In a new interview with the NY TimesGeorge Lucas said that he is tired of blockbuster movies and wants to make small personal art house-style movies instead.

“Why would I make any more [Star Wars movies] when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are? ” he says of negative fanboy reaction to the Star Wars prequels and special edition versions.

(According to the article he however didn’t entirely rule out a possible fifth Indiana Jones movie.)

Speaking of which, Lucas insists that the infamous “nuking the fridge” scene in the fourth Indiana Jones movie in which Harrison Ford’s character survives a nuclear bomb explosion by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator was his idea and not Spielberg’s as he claimed in a recent interview. “It’s not true,” Lucas said. “[Spielberg]’s trying to protect me.”

According the article it was in fact Spielberg who “didn’t believe” in the scene. Lucas actually put together a dossier on the odds of Indiana Jones surviving the nuke a fridge scenario: “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas maintains.

In the interview Lucas hints that racism is why no-one in Hollywood were interested in financing Red Tails, a movie about an all-black fighter squadron during WWII he ultimately paid for out of his own pocket. (The movie opens in the States on Friday.)

“I like to say James Cameron made a movie just like this,” he states in the interview. “Instead of black people, there were blue people being held down by white people. It was called Avatar! And the studios said the same thing to him: ‘We can’t do a movie with blue people!’ ”

Maybe Hollywood just remembered the Howard the Duck fiasco and that Lucas never really had a box office hit outside of American Graffiti and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises . . . a fact which the article in question blithely ignores.

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James has been running The Sci-Fi Movie Page since Before the Beginning of Time Itself (TM), i.e. since the site's inception in 1997. In addition to sci-fi James also likes 1970s motorbikes and chili dogs although he doesn't own the former and no longer eats the latter. He currently resides in Kiev, Ukraine for reasons best left unexplained.